Half-Life Universe Project Idea

I was thinking this morning about all the new features that have ben introduced into Half-Life via maps and mods and thought that it may make an interesting projects for somebody. Don’t worry I’m not going to try and do it and then lose focus on the site.

To be perfectly honest I’m not exactly sure what type of effects should be or could be included. I suppose I am thinking of something similar to the Game Innovations Database.

For example, when was the first time temperature was used within the Half-Life universe? Was it in the game or a mod? I’m pretty sure I remember playing a mod where you entered a storage area and the temperature was below freezing. This forced the player to rush because his health level started to drop slowly.

Those are the types of things I am interested in reading about and there must be many, many similar things.

I would even be prepared to host the database if somebody was commited enough to creating it. Perhaps it could simply be a wiki where the HL community adds the details.

7 Comments

Very interesting idea. Sorry about my absence from the site from the last few days – I’ve been
up to my knees in php…

Anyway, yeah great idea. Do you mean a mod that
brings all those innovations together? Also, in HL I do believe you got hurt if you spent too wrong in a cold environment. I think it was that level with the huge meat refrigerator.

That would be a good project for a wiki. Or simply a wikipedia page, “list of half-life features”

And it was the freezer after you met the scientist before you fought the black ops for the first time. The freezer sapped your suit’s power, not your health. The Freezer was full of enemies who were unaffected by the cold, which was really cheap, IMHO. The meat locker was on your way up to the surface, where you had to go through to open a push door with the a scientist on the other side. what was cool was after that part you could go back and pick up 3 Barnies for taking on 2 Zombies, then having to leave them all behind as you had to jump across an elevator shaft.

The meat freezer in the original Half-Life did not drain your health (and I should know, I spent a good deal of time there trying to get eleven NPCs in one room). The only freezer area that did that to my knowledge was the one in the Invasion mod.

No, not just a big half-life site, there are a few of those already. But a site that lists the gameplay features introduce in HAlf-Life games and mods. When was the first time you could climb a rope for example? The answer in this case is easy: Opposing Force. But other features may be harder to remember.

Innovations seems to be pretty hard to achieve it. You can work on something you probabily guess it’s wonderful and no one seen ever and you will play a simple game and you will inmediatly say “holy crap, I’m doing this right now!”

The levels of innovations are, of course, different… depending what are you creating. You can swin on tons of code’s lines, spend hours trying to make an fanstatic and original algorithm, AI, weapon or something similar, and when you’re near to finish it… a good one just pops up, 100% better than yours.

The same happens with level design. You can modify fifty times the same map, to put that thing you want to scare the player, or just that thing you want the player see… It’s not enough, someone has done it before.

Anyway, I guess if someone is creative on that kind of things, innovations can appear just for accident or luck. We can mix the things togheter, things you saw before, to create something new.

And about that “new” things, this topic is available.

Just for tell something, I’ve done something I didn’t see before on my own mod:

You gain experience when you kill enemies, but that’s not I want to talking about… when you die, you lost 100 XP points, and that forces you kill yourself. So the player needs to choice if it want to fight to die (and lost his Xp) or give up and suicide. This touch a bit player’s ethics or moral perhaps. I guess it’s a good idea.